It’s official, .internal is blocked forever
ICANN has formally confirmed that the gTLD .internal will never be delegated.
Its board of directors resolved earlier this week that it “reserves .INTERNAL from delegation in the DNS root zone permanently to provide for its use in private-use applications.”
It went on to recommend “that efforts be undertaken to raise awareness of its reservation for this purpose through the organization’s technical outreach.”
The idea is to give organizations a gTLD that they can use behind their firewalls that they can be sure will never become a public-DNS gTLD in future, which would carry the risk of name collisions and data leakage.
The string “internal” was picked in January over .private and put out for public comment to murmurs of approval.
The move means nobody will be able to apply for .internal in future new gTLD application rounds.
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